NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Review: The $400 Fight
by Ryan Smith on May 30, 2013 9:00 AM ESTBattlefield 3
Our final multiplayer action game of our benchmark suite is Battlefield 3, DICE’s 2011 multiplayer military shooter. Its ability to pose a significant challenge to GPUs has been dulled some by time and drivers, but it’s still a challenge if you want to hit the highest settings at the highest resolutions at the highest anti-aliasing levels. Furthermore while we can crack 60fps in single player mode, our rule of thumb here is that multiplayer framerates will dip to half our single player framerates, so hitting high framerates here may not be high enough.
GTX 770 is going to struggle with BF3 at 2560 with everything turned up, but dropping down to 1920 is enough to get the average framerate well above 60fps, and consequently the minimum framerates should be well above 30fps too. In this case this is another game NVIDIA traditionally excels at, leading to a 15% performance advantage over the 7970GE. The gains against the GTX 680 are far more muted at just 6% - indicating that we’re not seeing much of a benefit from more memory bandwidth – while it’s another very big step up from the GTX 570 at 83%.
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ninjaquick - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Delta Percentages: The 7990 just needs to be removed, it skews the whole chart way too much.Brainling - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
It's a nice card, but not nice enough for me to upgrade my 670. If it had been a slightly more paired down GK110, I would have considered it...but the performance gains are just not enough to justify replacing my 670 (which still has little trouble with most games).I'll spend my computing dollar on going from Sandy Bridge -> Haswell instead, and wait for the eventual 800 series sometime next year (which should be a new micro architecture).
The0ne - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
"... the rest of the year will be a battle of prices and bundles."Can't wait.
Runadumb - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Firstly Thank you for the detailed review.Right, I could pull the trigger on two of these (when they come out with 4GB versions) as they are 85%+ above my current 2x570GTX's. Thanks for having 570's in the results by the way.
My BIG question is: Is the proper next-gen cards still due early next year or is this all we've got for the next 18 months? The rumour mill is fine here.
As I run 3 displays and a 6000x1080p resolution I literally can never have too much performance. So if waiting until next year meant I get a better upgrade I'm happy to do it. This system can just about keep me going right now.
I may abandon the 3 screen setup for a consumer version Oculus Rift but how long away is that? I want to hedge my bets.
jwcalla - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
I think Maxwell is going to be more like mid-2014. It seems aggressive though... a new architecture, a shrink to 20nm and they're shoe-horning a 64-bit ARM chip in there. Lots of opportunities for delays IMO. But it might be a wise idea to wait... NVIDIA is promising (read: take with a grain of salt) 3x "GFLOPS per watt" over Kepler, and about 7-8x over Fermi. It's hard to predict how that will scale into performance though.Ryan Smith - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
It would be historically accurate to state that NVIDIA typically releases new architectures on new nodes, and that both Maxwell and TSMC 20nm are scheduled for 2014. When in 2014 is currently something only NVIDIA could tell you.But I would say this: consider this the half-time show. This is the mid-generation refresh, so we're roughly half-way between the launch of Kepler and Maxwell.
araczynski - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Hopefully by the time I replace my aging E8500/6970 system (which still plays everything I care about pretty well at 1080p) with a haswell, this thing will have a 4GB option so i can make another long lasting rig.xdesire - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Ok i see that this is an overclocked/tweaked GTX 680 but what in the hell is that TDP?!HEADHUNTERZ! - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
Soooo...where does the GTX 670 FTW compare to the GTX 770!? Theyre both the same price! So which one would be a better decision to make?JPForums - Thursday, May 30, 2013 - link
They won't be priced the same for long. Unfortunately, I just can't see a GTX670FTW beating a GTX770 (especially with a factory overclock). I wonder if there is enough overclocking headroom for a GTX770FTW.